


Five Things Illyana Did with Her Sword (and One Thing She Did Not Do)

by KittyViolet



Category: New Mutants (Comics), She-Ra and the Princesses of Power (2018), X-Men (Comicverse), X-Men - All Media Types
Genre: Cooking, Cosplay, F/F, F/M, Flirting, Fluff and Humor, Friends to Lovers, M/M, Puns & Word Play, Religion, Swords
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-02
Updated: 2020-07-04
Packaged: 2021-03-05 05:48:32
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Underage
Chapters: 6
Words: 3,817
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25039516
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/KittyViolet/pseuds/KittyViolet
Summary: If you're here for extra-flirty Katyana content, thank you for showing up; that will come at the end. First five chapters are G or PG-rated quick stories about what else our OTP did (with a sword).
Relationships: Kitty Pryde/Illyana Rasputin, Roberto da Costa/Sam Guthrie
Comments: 4
Kudos: 19





	1. Barbecue

**Author's Note:**

> If you're here for extra-flirty Katyana content, thank you for showing up; that will come at the end. First five chapters are G or PG-rated quick stories about what else our OTP did (with a sword).

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Rodizio for Kitty.

The New Mutants have an afternoon off from practice and schooling and trying not to get kidnapped or killed or in trouble; they’re hanging out in the backyard, and it’s backyard barbecue season ,at least in northern Westchester County. To Sam Guthrie, that could mean digging a pit and filling the pit with smoked wood and letting it burn, then laying pork shoulder and mutton on blocks and smoking them until they nearly fall apart. There are modern slow cookers, but he doesn’t trust them. Ma never did. 

To Rahne, it’s a baffling American ritual, though it will end in a tasty dinner and a social group that includes her, so she’s fine with it. (For some reason, as a tyke, she thought barbecue was a name for something with prawns, in Australia; far away from her land, anyway.)

To Kitty, it’s not necessarily something she’ll eat: she doesn’t want to tell the New Mutants that she’ll stay away from pork, or from anything that’s come in contact with pork, but she’ll definitely try the Kentucky mutton. And the steak. She’s curled up against a tree with Illyana and Dani while the older girl tries to explain something nobody else can hear. There’s a programming textbook and a French dictionary by her thigh, both closed.

To Roberto da Costa, on the other hand, barbecue is a national emergency. 

“That’s not how you do it,” Berto tells Sam, confusing his taller, older best friend.

“Is too,” Sam says. “It’s how Ma does it, and it’s how we’re gonna barbecue when humans and mutants terraform Mars. I bet Larry Niven uses vinegar too. And this mess of smoked wood.” He takes the enormous tongs and prods the hickory logs under the cement block.

“Where I come from barbecue is noble and daring,” Roberto parries. “We are barbecue heroes. Adventurers. Swashbucklers.” He’s clearly looking around for a prop of some kind: something to stir, or alter, the meat on the blocks. He picks up a stick and rejects it. “Rodizio,” he says, pronouncing it “deetz-ee-oh.” “That’s real barbecue.”

“Ain’t hot enough,” Sam pronounces. “Too close to thermal equilibrium.”

“Show-off,” Roberto says.

“Look who’s talking. Maybe you ought to show us your rodeo.”

“Rodizio,” Roberto replies, mock-testy. 

“What is that anyway?” Amara asks, drawing close to the pit and the flames.

“Brazilian barbecue style where once the meat’s half-done we grill it on a sword. With steak and pork. Then you get to cut or tear the meat off the sword when it’s ready. It’s the best.”

“But we have nae swords,” Rahne says innocently. “We canna do it your way.”

Kitty tickles and prods Illyana, toe to toe. “Yana, are you listening to this?”

That’s how she finds out her girlfriend (they’ve just this week begun using the term) is almost asleep in the sun. “Mmmmmmwhat? It’s Ilya. Americans don’t speak Russian. I was asleep. My hair’s in your mouth now. Who? –Oh! Of course I’ve been listening.”

The Russian mutant stands up and strides purposefully to the meat cooler, right beside Sam, and looks around for Magma. “Amara?”

“I think she’s asking you to heat up the wood underneath the grill with your lava,” says Kitty.

“It’s always nice,” responds the Nova Roman girl, “when someone gives me something to do.” The hickory logs suddenly crackle with red, green, blue, white flames and then subside. Barbecue smoke-scent fills the air, but most of the meat’s still in the cooler.

Illyana opens the cooler, manifests her soulsword, and stabs the mutton, the lamb, the beef, then holds the sword over the flames and speaks a few words in a language no one else alive on Earth can understand. There’s a flash and a sideways stepping disc and when she takes the sword full of meat from the open fire pit Roberto whistles as he reaches for forks and steakknives.

“Now that’s rodizio,” he says appreciatively, lifting a keg of lemonade and a keg of something else. There’s no label; who knows?

Sam passes out plastic plates and smiles back at his best friend, then looks concerned. “Didn't Berto want pork?”

Illyana raises her eyebrows. “I didn’t do this for Roberto.”

Kitty gives two thumbs up, first to her girlfriend, then to the steak on her plate.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Kentucky mutton barbecue is a real thing: https://www.thespruceeats.com/owensboro-mutton-barbecue-331595.


	2. Princess

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> "Just once, and you owe me." Taken from Waiting for the Trade.

“It really is that good,” Illyana reports. Kitty nods, trying to shake out a crick in her neck.

“What is?” ask Doug and Dani, simultaneously. They’re all on big pillows, on couches, under blankets, taking it easy after a very tough day in Magneto’s Danger Room.

“She-Ra,” Shadowcat and Magik exclaim simultaneously.

“Nae, ye canna mean that,” Rahne tells the assembled New Mutants and Kitty. “I’m the youngest among ye and I’ve seen the She-Ra cartoon an’ I felt it was aye too young for me. I’ve read comic books with more plot an’ more characters changin’.”

Sam looks directly at Rahne and Kitty realizes that he’s upset because she seems to have dinged all comic books. Then Rahne figures it out too. “I dinna mean to insult your favorites, Sam. But that show is for young kids.”

“Not that She-Ra,” Kitty chimes in. “The one we’ve been watching comes from, like, years in our future.”

“Is it a dark future?” Sam wants to know.

“We’re not sure,” the X-Man from Illinois admits. “Illyana’s stepping discs can’t really do enough time travel to affect events. What we can do is watch some future TV through the portals the stepping discs create. And this show is the best.”

“What makes it the best?” Doug’s into it.

“Everything.” Illyana nods, which means that Kitty can say more about why she likes it. “There are these… princess types from another planet who control the powers of the planet and there’s this army led by robots—they’re like Sentinels but with variable numbers of eyes—and this girl who’s, like, our age who basically has a Soulsword and she’s really into being the brave one and the self-sacrificing one but she’s kind of in love with her best friend who is somehow also a cat…” Kitty trails off, realizing she’s said too much.

Douglas Ramsey, however, wants to hear more. Or see more. “Illyana?” he says.

“Yessssss?” Magik is, in fact, taller than Doug, but the way she looks down her nose at him would make her seem taller even if she were not.

“I’m…. familiar with She-Ra?” He means he’s been watching the show that’s already on TV in their time, not the future show Illyana likes. She raises her eyebrow and he starts speaking to her in Russian.

“Fine,” she says. “But just once, and you owe me.” 

Then she lets armor—just a few pieces, the breastplace and greaves—appear on her body, pulls the Soulsword out of nowhere, and holds it decisively above her head. “By the power of Grayskull!” Illyana announces, smiling and then smirking at Doug and the rest of her friends. Then the sword disappears.

Doug smiles and hands Illyana a clean $20 bill, and Kitty smiles indulgently at them both.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Central joke for this chapter dramatizes, but does not improve upon, one of my favorite Waiting for the Trade cartoons: https://waitingforthet.tumblr.com/day/2020/06/17 If you're not reading Waiting for the Trade already, please start!


	3. Cut

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> "I've been trying to figure out why you're scared of me and I think I've figured something out."

“Didn’t you tell me you were afraid of Kurt when you two first met?” Kitty and Illyana are sharing enormous, frothy, retro-romantic fountain sodas at the Salem Center Retro Diner.

“I was so young.”

“You’re young now.”

“I was younger. I just had no idea. Can you believe when I first met Ororo I said something about her eyes?”

Illyana’s bangs get in the way of her facepalm. “You figured out why I was asking, right?”

Kitty’s only slightly bitten fingernails move to cover Illyana’s swordplay-strengthened left hand. “Rahne.”

“Rahne. She’s still scared of me and I can’t figure out how to help and it’s affecting her fighting style when we’re in fight situations. I mean, I feel like I ought to know something about complex trauma at this point in our lives but I’m not exactly Teenage Mutant Ninja Therapist. I’d give myself something like an 10 for Wisdom.”

“And an 18 for Charisma,” Kitty says, kissing her girlfriend almost chastely. “Ilya. Wait. I have an idea.” And she whispers. Illyana balls up a paper napkin in her right hand.

That night Kitty asks Roberto and Dani and the rest of them to leave the kitchen for what she calls a demonstration. “Babysitting the X-babies, huh?” Roberto says. Kitty rolls her eyes. They follow her out.

Illyana puts her hand on Wolfsbane’s arm, being careful only to touch her long sleeve. “Rahne,” she says.

“Aye?” 

“I don’t bite. I mean, I do bite, but, like, rye bread. Pretzel sticks. Mutton jerky. Pencils, sometimes. I’ve been trying to figure out why you’re scared of me and I think I’ve figured something out.”

“It’s because ye’re eee—” And then she corrects herself. “Even more powerful than the rest of us and I have nae figured out how to be around ye and I’m sorry but I just canna, okay?”

“Rahne.” Now it sounds like Illyana’s been practicing. (She has.) “I think you’re scared of me because you’re still scared of yourself. That Reverend guy—”

Rahne shudders; Illyana continues. “He told you your powers were evil. That you were evil. That people like you were evil. Demonic and magical. And you know what?”

She shudders again. “I don’t know if I’m evil. I mean, I know that part of me is demonic and magical but the rest of it? I can’t help what I am. I can only help what I choose to do. And you know what I have?”

Silence. Rahne wonders whether Kitty or Dani or anybody else she trusts more is secretly listening. Magik knows who is.

“I have a sword. A Soulsword. When it’s in one mode it’s just an awesome sword. The kind Sam pretends to have when he’s playing D&D. But when it’s in another mode it only affects—it slices up—magical creatures. Demons and the like. Slices them up like a steakknife. Leaves everyone else alone, just passes through them the way my girlfriend does. Yes, she’s my girlfriend. And you’re not a demon. You’ve nothing to do with demons and magic and spells. You’re a mutant who has a wolf form, and you’re beautiful and powerful and good.”

“How do you know?” Rahne says, listening hard to herself. “How do you know?”

“This is how I know.” And Illyana brings out her Soulsword and—that’s how it would look if anyone were watching, which nobody is—slices the Scottish mutant in half, right below her ribcage, before she can think to change shape or defend herself.

And nothing happens. The Soulsword emerges from the other side of Rahne as if it had moved through nothing but mist, or air.

Rahne looks at Illyana. “I couldnae imagine ye’d do such a thing, Illyana! Ye ran me through!” Then she looks down at herself. “But ye didn’t.”

“I didn’t. There is nothing demonic about you. No otherworldly magic. Nothing to frighten you about yourself except a man who lied to you—I know something about being raised by someone who lies to you—a man who told you the deepest truths about yourself, and your deepest capacities for love and pleasure and your very body, were wrong. 

“And that man—I hate that man so much right now. But how you feel about him—that’s not up to me.

“What’s up to me is what I do with my sword. Which is a part of me now, like it or not. And my sword—if you had any ancient evil, any supernatural affliction, anything demonic in you, you would know. I know.” And Illyana runs her finger along the Soulsword blade, drawing blood, no more than she would on a kitchen knife, before she sheathes it magically in herself.

Rahne looks at Illyana, walks towards her, walks away, looks up at her (Illyana’s a good deal taller than Rahne) with wide-open eyes, and mouths something that could be “Do you,” or could be “Thank you.”

Upstairs, in the library, Dani squeezes Kitty’s hand, and nods, and says “Your girlfriend did something good.”


	4. Wood

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A lumbering dilemma.

Colossus is out in the yard of the mansion again, clearing weeds and taking out dead trees. One side effect from so many attacks on the X-Mansion: there are a lot of dead trees.

“By Lenin’s ghost,” he says, “I will take this stump out of the ground or my soul will be forfeit!” Straining with all his organic steel muscles, he yanks another oak trunk out of the ground.

“I feel like I’ve heard you say that before,” Illyana tells her brother, “when I was very small. Also, the thing with your soul being forfeit? Not funny. Been there. Done that.”

“I’m sorry, my snowflake,” Piotr says, almost tousling her hair, then thinking better of it. He’s still organic steel. “I have the feeling that there is a great conflict within me, where part of me feels that what I do should be easy, and another says it is so hard.”

“People think stuff that’s easy for me is hard for me, and the other way around, too,” says Illyana. “Only Kitty understands,” she adds, and then realize that maybe her brother doesn’t want to hear about his ex-girlfriend. Discretion was never her strongest suit.

Piotr nods and grumbles in Russian. “The Professor wanted to clear more land for a greenhouse but there are so many stumps. I do not have the persistence the task requires any more, I fear. I have done so much for the X-Men and sometimes I think I received so little in return.”

“Let me help.”

“What?”

“Where are the trees you have to cut down?”

“Over there.” Piotr points to three tangled-looking groves, none of them old growth, one of them mostly vines.

“Got it.” Magik smiles and manifests her soulsword.

Ten minutes later the Xavier School’s front lawn has five stacks of neat, thin wooden discs.

“How did you do that?” Piotr asks.

“Part hack and slash, part stepping discs to take bits out of the middle,” Illyana explains. 

“What would I do without my snowflake?” Colossus asks, squeezing her shoulders as he strides towards the heavy stacks of cut wooden discs, the remains of a few tree stumps, the levelled lawn.

“Sword lesbians,” Dani says from the roof. “Gotta love ‘em.”

“Bow and arrow lesbians aren’t so bad, you know,” says Xi’an. “But that’s our Magik. Never get a chainsaw or a spell or a machine when a sword will do.”


	5. Dagger

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Illyana and Megan make up.

“Illyana?”

“Megan?” They haven’t had a conversation in weeks. Magik is still in the brig on Utopia. She knows what she did was worth doing, but it’s not like she’s had time to make the case to anyone but Scott. Or to anyone who can understand, yet.

“When you made sure I got my soul gems back, and gave me my dagger in that jewel case, and I asked you if you were a real girl now?”

“I want the best for you, Megan, I honor you, and I honestly don’t quite know what you’re asking.”

“Are you still real if you’ve got, like, a weapon inside you? If you’re part weapon because of the things you’ve done? Like, what does that do to you?”

“I would advise you to take that up with Logan. I’m pretty sure you two have met?”

Megan Gwynn sighs and shakes out her pink hair. “You’re like him, aren’t you? Both of you part weapon. Both of you can do the things that have to be done to save the world even if they’re so scary or ugly that people like me couldn’t bring ourselves to do them.”

Illyana nods.

“You could break out of the X-Brig any time you wanted, couldn’t you?”

She nods again.

“Living with other people and their rules is really hard sometimes. Everyone thinks I’m supposed to be good and innocent and I have to be protected, because I am—I was—the youngest mutant. Pure of heart and all that. Sometimes I want to prove them wrong.”

“You want to prove them wrong by hurting me.”

Megan’s black eyes are as wide as they’ve ever been. Magik gets it.

And Magik’s not done. “Do you want to fight me?”

“What?”

“This is a Logan kind of problem, not knowing what to do with the weapon part of you, and there’s a Logan solution. Fight me. Combat. Work it out.”

“How can you even?”

“Use your soul dagger in magic-only mode. Only hurts magic targets. Zips right through anything else.” Illyana manifests her soulsword and leans on it so that the blade passes through the bars of the X-brig’s outer walls. “Fight me.”

And Megan Gwynn manifests her pink soul dagger, the one the Darkchild made, before Illyana regained, and risked, and kept her soul, and the two of them spar—uneasily and then happily, with the joy of comrades and the grace of fencers, until they tire each other out.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Takes place soon after New Mutants (v. 3, 2009), 25.


	6. Between

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A walk in the forest, with benefits.

“So you are definitely not dating my brother at this time.”

“Under no circumstances.” Kitty rolls her eyes.

“And you are not dating anyone in a monogamous rules-other-people-out kind of way.”

“I spent who knows how long in a giant celibacy bullet and landed in the same very public straight girl relationship that I had when I was—before we—you know. With your brother. Very monogamous, that guy. Sorry. No.”

“And you… I hate explaining myself, but you understand? It wasn’t… with the Elder Gods? It wasn’t revenge.”

“You took a risk in order to take out an existential threat to the whole of creation. I get that now. Honestly I think Scott gets it too. I am the opposite of angry at you. I know you are the Illyana I knew.”

“You can’t phase through that. There’s a tracker thingy, see?” Storm gave Wakandan technology to X-Club so they could use it to monitor toxins and growth levels in Marin County’s old growth, whenever the X-Men left Utopia for nature walks, picnics, weekends in the woods. Which, at the moment, they felt it was safe to do. Or not unsafe. As safe as the X-Men can get.

Kitty draws back inches before she would have phased through a redwood plant chemistry tracker. “Good call, roomie. Did you know I wrote some of the code for these things?”

“I did not. I can’t believe you called me roomie.”

“I can. Sometimes I feel like we still share that bedroom, you know?” Kitty closes her eyes and reaches out her hand towards her best friend, the girl who knew everything about her, all her secrets, before she died and came back to life.

“Don’t close your eyes, you’ll walk into a tree again.”

“Does this tree have X-Club tech attached?”

“No, just a tree.”

“I’m the girl who walks through trees.” Kitty manages to hold hands with Illyana and walk forward while Illyana stays on the path and Kitty phases through the tree trunk.

“Sophistry,” Illyana says, gently.

“I’m supposed to be the one who makes the puns. Look up there! It’s a freshwater fish?”

Illyana looks up to the branches, dozens of meters above their heads. “What?”

“A fish with a hammer and saw!”

“What what what what?”

“Carp in tree.”

Illyana’s eyeroll can only be described as epic.

“Are we hiking?” Kitty asks.

“I guess so. I just… I thought it was time for us to get out of there and take a walk, now that we’re both, you know, alive and not imprisoned and not disembodied.”

“Not like that happens every day.”

“I know, right? You look tired.”

“I am tired. Can we take a nap?”

“Seriously? Kitty Pryde gets tuckered out by a walk through the forest? Also, wouldn’t we get caught if we just, you know, lay down off the trail in the woods? This is kind of a famous place to take nature walks.”

“Can’t you just, you know, cast Pass Without Trace?”

Illyana gives Kitty what can almost be described as a withering glare, although Shadowcat, crunching a leaf slightly under her suede boot, does not wither. Instead she presses her advantage. “There must be a spell to make people’s minds see only the redwoods, not the people near them. Like sleight of hand, to psych them out. What’s it called? Wait… psych! eye a tree.”

“I hate you.”

“I know.” A pause. “And I want to lie down.”

Illyana speaks a couple of words and a low bed manifests itself a few feet off the path, between the massive, ropy trunks. The two of them promptly flop down on it.

“We’re not expected back till tomorrow? No guard shifts, no nothing, right?”

“I arranged it,” Kitty says.

The two women turn their backs on each other while Illyana removes her small pack, and then face each other again. Once their eyes meet they do not look away.

“How do I know,” Kitty says, “how do I know you still want this? What we had before. Because you know I do.” Her lips are trembling. They’re ready to kiss Illyana right this second, if she’d say the word.

Maybe she wants to do more than kiss. Magik falls backwards onto the bed she’s conjured, her straight blond hair spreading unevenly across the pillow. “When two adventurers were not supposed to sleep together or do anything, you know, physical, in the old tales, and they had to share a bed, they would sleep with a sword between them, to show that they were, you know, not fucking. And that they did not want to fuck.”

“So if we lie down in the same bed and there’s no sword between us, then I’ll know…”

Illyana nods approvingly.

“Then I’ll know you want it.”

Kitty flops down on the bed too, all the way down, until she and Illyana are inseparable, rolling over one way, then the other, Kitty’s hands on her best friend’s belt buckle, Illyana’s hands in Kitty’s shirt. One nipple and then the other. One tongue and then the other. 

They don’t even get Illyana’s work pants or Kitty’s slim black ones off before Illyana’s palm is between Kitty’s thighs, and they’re wrapped loosely around each other, and Kitty, and then Illyana, are making sounds that only the redwoods hear.

“I missed you so much, Ilya. For so long. You… everything… anything…. oh… Oh!” As Illyana’s fingers and thumb move faster and then more slowly, Kitty cries out and then phases through the bed, through the bedframe, through the soil below, and climbs up, half-dressed, back into the bed where Illyana still lays and starts to lick her shirt until she opens her shirt all the way, and then Kitty climbs over her. Illyana has almost never smiled this broadly. Not even when they shared that perfect bedroom.

The two of them stay in the woods until after midnight, unseen. No sword appears.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Takes place sometime between Uncanny X-Men 543 and 544.

**Author's Note:**

> For the backstory on Colossus and tree stumps: https://www.syfy.com/syfywire/how-drawing-colossus-made-legendary-artist-quit-x-men-comics


End file.
